Bedouin Heritage: The World of the Arabian Horse
by Matthias Oster
Review by Hylke Hettema

   In Bedouin Heritage (2016), Matthias Oster proposes to take his readers on a journey back in time to a world long gone.  The author argues that in order to grasp the nature and understand the concept of the Arabian horse, one must venture into its world; that of the Bedouin.  He aims to give the reader a new perspective by re-sketching the surroundings and society from which the breed emerged through “numerous citations from authorities from many centuries, disciplines and origins from all over the world.”

   The enormous amount of information presented in this work is organized in a surprising, yet familiar framework. Using the example of the notorious Lawrence of Arabia and his pillars[1], combined with the idea that biblical evidence supports such an outline, the author presents us somewhat a guidebook for understanding and breeding Arabian horses based on seven pillars. A brief description of the desert and most of its animal inhabitants sets the stage for the saga of the Arab Nomads.  A chapter about Bedouin history circles around the connection between the bible and Bedouin.  Three main arguments are made to support this connection; first the idea that the bible contains an accurate description of Bedouin society, and matches that of the early Orientalist renderings of encounters with Bedouin in the Middle East. Second the author links the camel, the center of Bedouin society and culture, to Abraham and Ishmael.  And third it is argued that Bedouin society is based on kinship systems that are found in the Bible. A chapter on Bedouin society follows. Using Orientalist writings and Biblical examples, the author elaborates on the social but also infra- structures of Arab Nomads. In this chapter the camel plays a more prominent role in the narrative and it isn’t until the aspect of religion is discussed that more examples about the role and position of horses are brought forward.

   This changes in the next chapter on Bedouin tribes, in which the author discusses the Arab tribes who have been known to keep horses.  To make it tangible, the connection to current breeding programs is made by showing which tribes bred certain horses that have been imported across the globe in the modern period. Subsequently the topic of strains (bloodlines) is brought up. A brief overview of the concept of strain-theory among breeders is provided before the author elaborates on the various strains, illustrated by photos of famous horses throughout recent history. A brief chapter called Bedouin Tradition discusses the role of Arabic poetry featuring horses and horse descriptions, followed by a chapter on the characteristics of the Bedouin horse and a scientific chapter about all things medical regarding horses and some genetic diseases particular to Arabian horses. A concluding chapter brings the reader back to the Bible and the proposed connection between Bedouin culture and biblical scriptures.

   Despite its popularity among Arabian horse enthusiasts, this work can not be compared to the average book on the breed. It contains far more detailed and carefully selected information about the Bedouin society and culture from which this breed is said to have sprouted. The author is also touching upon public debates about purity of blood and the concept of strain theory and subsequent breeding strategies. The chapter about the tribes is a treasure of information not only to breeders of Arabian horses but also to those who research migration and cultural exchange.

   A reader with a more general interest in both nomads and horses may however be overwhelmed by the amount of text and detail of the book. The focus lies with a specific type of Arabian horses[2] and many of the names and examples of individual horses given may be lost on a reader with no background knowledge of tribal systems and Arabian horse bloodlines of the Middle East.  An academic reader will notice the use of rather outdated or refuted sources, as well as an enormous corpus of Orientalist material. When it comes to the description of the desert and perhaps the animals it might not cause trouble, but using, and in this case, literally copying Orientalist works to sketch Bedouin society, tradition and ‘qualities’ is at least dubious. It would seem the author is not aware of the contextualization needed for both Oriental works as well as Arabic poetry. He does mention such poetry probably is more symbolic than real, but does not show the ongoing debate surrounding the idea of the existence of actual Pre-Islamic poetry.

   In conclusion Bedouin Heritage deserves to be ranked among the better works on Arabian horses as product of Bedouin society and culture. Especially when readers are looking for a detailed overview of the concept of both Bedouin life as well of the idea of the Arabian horse. To a more seasoned reader on the topic of Oriental horses this work however comes across as somewhat neo-Orientalist, mainly because of the constant efforts to tie the concept of Arabian horse breeding to the Bible as well as the justification of appropriation of the breed by others than Arabs/Bedouin themselves. It may be clear that the author admires the romantic adventures of the Orientalist writers on the topic very much and has tried to re-create his own story in a similar manner, therefore part of his goal is completed. While none of this information is in fact new, the book offers a unique perspective in terms of its enormous amount of information.

[1] Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 1922

[2] Straight Egyptian/Asil Arabians

Horse Nations, by Peter Mitchell, 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Review by Kathryn Renton

   In Horse Nations (2015), Peter Mitchell offers a wide-ranging synthesis of archaeological, ethnographic and material culture studies to describe the impact of horses in the “post-1492” world. Horses, reduced to Eurasia from their original evolutionary footprint, were then reintroduced by European efforts to colonize the Americas, Africa and Oceanasia. The rapid emergence of the “equestrian nomad”, like the Apache in North America and the Mapuche in Chile, demonstrates the dramatic transformations that horses could bring in just a short period of time.

   Mitchell moves beyond the stereotypical image of the indigenous raider on horseback to explore the diverse range of responses to the expanding presence of the horse. Using critical post-colonial methodology, contact with the horse becomes a set of mutually entangling processes, rather than externally imposed or internally motivated change in the areas affected by European colonization.[1] In collecting material culture evidence for dynamic processes of ethnogenesis that accompanied the adoption of the horse, Mitchell reviews nine distinct ecological regions and offers a four part typology: first, hunter-gatherer or mobile groups that became equestrian nomads, largely for big game hunting in the Prairie and Gran Chaco regions; second, semi-mobile pastoralists, using horses as accessories to other economic pursuits like herding, including the Navajo, Comanche and Australian aborigine; third, raiders and traders interested in the horse as an object for consumption, including the Great Basin Utes and South African Khoe; and fourth, sedentary and hierarchical groups that adopted horses for less obvious economic motives, most strikingly the Araucanians in the Southern Cone.

   Mitchell, a specialist in South African archaeology of nomadism, ranges far afield in his proposal for the category of “horse nations” as a particular global phenomenon that emerged in the sixteenth through nineteenth century. Beyond the question of the horse itself, Mitchell aims to provoke a broader comparative examination of nomadism. Through this overview, Mitchell makes the case for gradations in the range of movement and social stratification used to identify characteristic cultural traits based on interaction with adoption of the horse in diverse regions, without distinguishing ‘equestrian nomads’ from pastoralist nomads, and its reflection on the degree of sophistication in indigenous culture groups.[2]

   Instead, Mitchell introduces the unpredictable role of “ontological relations” as an explanatory factor for the degree of adaptive flexible that made it possible to accommodate the horse.[3] While not fully developed in this work, the anthropological concept of ontological relations determining human-animal relations moves beyond the functional or environmental determinism of older archaeological and anthropological studies of nomadic cultures. It nevertheless raises new areas for greater scrutiny about the distinctions between domestic and wild animals. In this respect, incorporation of zooarchaeological literature and research would substantially complement Mitchell’s survey.

   Despite the global interest of this book, more attention is paid to the extant literature focused in the Americas, and makes evident the lacuna in other complementary regional literature, particularly in the African continent. One extensive barrier, within the field of archaeology, stands at the division between prehistoric archaeology and palentology and later historical and ethnohistorical uses of archaeology. A second barrier to comparative nomadic studies appears in the vast leap from early hunter-gatherer interactions with feral horses and the historical development of domesticated horse populations, making clear the need for a new synthesis about the place of nomadism in Eurasian developments. Thus, as an enormously expansive, although not yet exhaustive, survey of major secondary works and primary studies, Horse Nations enriches the potential engagement between archaeology, history and anthropology on the topic of the horse in human-animal studies. It points the way to more work to come.

[1] See debate in American anthropological literature about cultural change attributed to the horse (Wissler 1912; Roe, 1955) or pre-existing trends within recipient cultures (Palermo, 1989)

[2] Thomas Barfield, 2015

[3] Philippe Descola 2013, Tim Ingold 2000

John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Review by Jordan Claridge

Now more than thirty years old, John Langdon’s Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500, still stands as not only one of the most influential historical monographs about horses, but also as a broad window into the economy and society of medieval England.

Langdon’s foray into the world of medieval horses was not through any of the ‘usual’ channels, as he was neither an historian nor an equine enthusiast. Originally trained as a chemical engineer, Langdon abruptly changed careers in his late thirties, moved to England and tried his hand at writing novels. In the course of writing two books set in the Middle Ages, he developed a taste for research and enrolled in the history PhD program at the University of Birmingham. It was at this point that he discovered a significant gap in the historiography of the medieval English economy: scholars such as Lynn White Jr. had long argued for the theoretical advantages that working horses held over oxen, but this had yet to be tested on any scale with historical evidence. In addition, there was still a strong contingent of historians who claimed that the introduction of the horse to English agriculture was basically irrelevant. So, Langdon set out to basically count the numbers of horses and oxen in England from Domesday Book in 1086 to the dawn of the early modern period.

Langdon’s background as an engineer allowed him to tackle this question with a method relatively novel to the field of medieval history at the time. Most economic and social studies of the medieval period were focused relatively narrowly in time and/or space. Some studies would look at a single manor over a long period of time, others would focus on a broader region, or even the whole country, but at a single point, like the Norman invasion in 1066 or the Black Death in 1348. Langdon endeavoured to take a national data sample that covered as much of medieval England as possible and to do this for most of the Middle Ages. Looking back on this from 2018, the amount of work required to assemble his data sample is impressive. This was before the technological advents of digital photography or even Excel spreadsheets. Langdon travelled around the country painstakingly reading medieval Latin manuscripts and tabulating the numbers of horses and oxen by hand.

The results were impressive. Langdon looked closely at the numbers of oxen and horses employed on both demesnes (the lord’s own farm with the manor, as opposed to the lands allocated to his or her peasant tenants) and peasant farms in medieval England. He found that, between the Domesday survey of 1086 and the end of his study in 1500, horses had largely superseded oxen as the choice for animal power both on the roads (as cart animals) and in the fields (as plough beasts). The proportion of working horses increased from about 30 percent in 1086 to over sixty percent by 1500. So, before 1200, oxen were the dominant work animals, and source of kinetic energy, on both farms and roads in England. By the sixteenth century, however, horses had achieved almost total ubiquity in the world of work animals. This had critical implications for the economy of medieval England, as the speed advantage of horses over oxen allowed more work to be done in less time. Horses offered significant premiums over oxen in terms of both speed and power which, in turn, had critical implications for agricultural production, transport and market transactions. The introduction of working horses allowed goods to be transported with greater efficiency while also helping improve agricultural output through increasing the speed at which essential tasks such as ploughing and harrowing could be completed. Improvement across all of these areas, facilitated by the introduction of working horses, was a key ingredient of England’s economic development.

Langdon also found that the change from oxen to horses was not uniform. Especially in the case of plough animals, for example, Norfolk, the Chiltern Hills and eastern Kent embraced all-horse plough teams earlier than any other part of the country. Also, while horses were increasingly employed in tandem with oxen in the midlands and the home counties over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many demesnes, especially in the West and North, never made the change and stuck exclusively with oxen for plough work. His long durée approach allows readers to appreciate how the evolving dynamic between horses and oxen existed not in a vacuum, but as one consideration that depended greatly on regional topographies, managerial mentalities and a host of other variables.

As Joan Thirsk had done before him, Langdon likened the medieval horse trade to the more modern car trade; with horses available at almost any price point. With this wide range in prices, cheap draught animals were made available to peasants just as the lower-end used car market does for lower-income people today. This led to another key finding: in medieval England, horses were very much a peasants’ animal. While horses had been expensive and prestigious beasts in the Anglo Saxon world, the taboo of eating horse flesh in England meant that older horses, perhaps nearing the end of their productive working lives, had very little market value. As they could not be fattened and sold for meat, an older horse was basically only worth the few pennies that could be fetched for its hide. However, for less demanding work on a small peasant farm, an older horse could be bought for little money and used for a number of years. The wide adoption of horse power by peasants did much to increase the area in which goods could be both bought and sold, allowing individuals access to previously inaccessible markets and thereby increasing the integration of previously disparate locales.

Alongside water and wind power, working animals were one of three essential sources of energy in the medieval economy. By understanding how England was furnished with this power, Langdon helped unlock key insights into how the medieval economy was able to grow during the crucial period of England’s, and indeed Europe’s, demographic and economic development from ca. 1250 to ca. 1350.

Kingdom of the Workhorse by A.J.Dampier
Countryside Publications, 1987
ISBN 0 86157 226 2

Review by Miriam Bibby

   This splendid account of the lives of working horses in and around the city of Manchester at its 19^th century zenith, when it was the “workshop of the world”, home to the greatest manufactories in Britain, is one of my favorite books.

   A.J. (Tony) Dampier was from north west England and knew his subject both from his own research and from contact with the horsemen of the region from the middle of the 20^th century until his sad death in 2011. It’s therefore largely, though not exclusively, based on local history and oral traditions. Arguably it’s the type of history of which we need more, because all too often the stories of working people and animals are not recorded and then they simply disappear. Frequently the only histories we have are those created after the theme has been viewed through a middle-class lens and dissected for academic purposes.  This, however, is working class history recorded by a local man with an in-depth knowledge of and passion for horses, and who had extensive, practical equine and equestrian experience himself.

   There are limitations to the book, however. Dampier’s broader brush strokes relating to early history are unconvincing: “No doubt these ‘dark Phaenicians’ horses were of Arabian origin” (11); “Then came the terrible, cruel Vikings, their contribution to our story is minimal, being a force of destruction rather than construction” (5). In fact, the Norse contribution to the north and its equine history is becoming better known and it’s increasingly looking like a substantial one, not just linguistically but also in terms of horse breeding and exchange. Dampier himself points out that the Norse derived “Rossendale” in Lancashire is the “Valley of Horses”.

   Away from the general though, Dampier is compelling. He understands the connectedness of early modern infrastructure, commerce, settlement, place names and language in the region in a way that’s both instinctive because it’s an embedded part of his own heritage, and academic, because he acquired local research library-based facts about the working horses of Manchester and the surrounding dales.

   This is revealed not just in the text but also in an excellent choice of outstanding images, such as the unidentified horse-drawn mass funeral in Manchester, ca. 1900, on page 25. We can only speculate on whether this reflects a local mining or industrial disaster, a family tragedy or an outbreak of disease. One local “Black Master” (director of horse-drawn funerals), John Greenwood, appears to have specialized in ensuring the working class had respectable funerals, for his advert in the Manchester Guardian in 1860 read: “John Greenwood begs respectfully to intimate that, in order to meet the requirements of the working classes, he has always for hire neat one horse hearses and coaches, terms (inc. coachman) 7/6d. each” (77).

   That’s another of the great strengths of the book – the attention to detail, a boon for those of us who like the facts of what things cost, how they were obtained and how ordinary folk lived. There’s plenty of detail about individual characters, such as Ailse O’ Fussers, the owner of Jerry, probably  “the last commercial pack horse in Great Britain.” (Actually a donkey, p. 7) Ailse (also known as Alice Hartley) was a commercial carrier, and her team of “gals” (Galloway ponies, though the term was probably being loosely applied to type and function rather than a “breed” here) carried lime across the moors to Rochdale until her death in 1879. “In build she was short and stout, and she wore over her petticoats a male’s topcoat. A ‘Jim-crow’ hat was fastened securely on her head by a handkerchief over the top of her hat and tied under her chin. She carried a long stick in the style of a shepherd, and presented more the appearance of a man than a woman. Yet she had a lover, named Thomas Walton, a young farmer…” (William Roberts, quoted on p. 15)

   Pack horse trains continued to be used across the Pennines, from Durham and Westmorland in the north, to Derbyshire in the south, until the late 19^th century and even, in some cases, possibly into the 20th. However, millennia of pack horse use were mostly brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of steam and it was now in the great cities and on ploughland that working horses were to find a place.

   In and around the streets of Manchester, Dampier introduces us to characters both equine and human; Dick Dalby, head horseman of the Prestwich Co-op stables, for instance, who taught all his horses to go on the ‘Pee Patch’ before they came into their stables after work – they had to pee before tea; Joe Bumper, the coal carrier from Rochdale who brought two poor horses to the local smith/farrier/vet and asked him to make one good one out of them only to be disappointed to discover that the “one good one” that the compassionate farrier “made” for him had a wall-eye, which Bumper “conna abide” (35).

   We learn about the secretly brutal methods of “horse whisperers” and the visit of the more enlightened (in Dampier’s view) Solomon Rarey to Manchester. We discover why a monopoly on the horse-drawn omnibuses in Manchester, created by the amalgamation of several companies in the late 19^th century, was bad for passengers but good for horses. We hear of the clever horse who taught himself to use the metal curbs on the edges of pavements as a brake, and the well-trained horse who stopped when a police officer held up his hand, even though his driver was asleep!

   Dampier explains why the trandem was used so widely in Manchester that it came to be known as a “Manchester Team” and why all newspaper delivery horses in Manchester were referred to as “Chron. Horses.” Plus, why well-meaning ideas often have unintended consequences. The horse troughs brought in by named donors at locations throughout the city were often key points for the spread of equine epidemics and “many transport companies forbade their drivers to stop at the troughs for fear of infecting their horses” (50).

   Some working horses were more fortunate than others, and the horses of the monopoly Manchester Carriage Company Ltd. in 1865 were “stabled in conditions approaching those that accommodated the pampered private horses. Large, well-ventilated stable blocks were constructed where the animals’ every comfort was considered. The usual dirt floors that had been expected to absorb any moisture and urine were replaced by blue brick floors with good drainage, high ceilings and plentiful windows all contributing to the sweet atmosphere” (49).

   They were the lucky ones. Where hard-nosed commercial demands prevailed, it could be a different story, driving the undercurrent of violence, superstition and chicanery that was never very far from horse trading. “Mugs” were set up by “horse for sale” adverts for in the Manchester Chronicle and Evening News, “using terms such as ‘Property of a gentleman going abroad’ or ‘Lady in reduced circumstances’. All horses were ‘regretfully for sale’ and ‘To good home only.’” (Both these last phrases are still in daily use on Facebook, with the usual addition of “through no fault of his or her own.”) The mugs, inevitably, ended out of pocket and the advertiser nowhere to be seen.

   Whether it’s describing travelling in the “rumble-tumble” (a large basket on the back of coaches that was supposed to hold luggage, but frequently carried unfortunate passengers desperate to travel), or describing the underhand methods used by coach companies to get round the “no galloping” rule, Dampier is always lively and readable. Like Anthony Dent, he entertains and carries the reader along, and as with Dent the reader is left wondering “Where did he get that?”, frustrated sometimes by the lack of references for follow-up purposes. It wasn’t written as an academic text but to record local stories and memories. Nonetheless, I believe that this is an essential source book for anyone with an interest in the working horses of 19^th century industrial Britain.

   It was clearly a labour of love for Tony Dampier, who also gave a home to Major, the last working horse on the streets of Manchester, for his final years. For this reason more than any other, Tony Dampier is a personal hero of mine and, to coin a phrase from Anthony Dent I think this is an outstanding book, “but I am prejudiced, so let it pass.” Dampier was a hero I never met; for though he wrote some articles for a magazine that I edited in the 1990s we didn’t have the opportunity to meet and talk, something that is of lasting regret to me. So, contact the knowledgeable while they’re alive; make the most of their experiences before it’s too late. And enjoy one of the most interesting books ever written about working horses.

Louise Hill Curth, ‘A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse’: Equine Medicine in Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Review by Janice Gunther Martin

Louise Hill Curth’s ‘A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse’: Equine Medicine in Early Modern England is the first modern study in English of early modern equine medicine. It follows from Curth’s earlier scholarship examining early modern veterinary medicine in general.¹ She applies current methodologies in the history of medicine to her subject; in particular, instead of dismissing past medical ideas and practices as barbaric and ignorant, she seeks to understand them on their own terms. Though the ideas and practices in this book might be unfamiliar to those outside the fields of the history of science and medicine, the clarity of writing makes the material accessible and interesting to non-specialists.

The book begins with an overview of ancient and medieval equine medicine before turning to the structure of equine medical practice in early modern England. Medical historians sometimes apply the term “medical marketplace” to describe the multiplicity of healing options available to people in this period. Curth extended the concept to animal healing in a 2002 article in which she coined the term “veterinary marketplace,” which she continues to use here.² She accordingly explores the different people charged with equine upkeep and healing, including members of the London Company of Farriers, horse-leeches, and servants. The book’s main chronological scope ends with the institutionalization of veterinary education in England with the founding of the Royal Veterinary College in 1791.

Her exploration of early modern medicine on its own terms is evident in the book’s middle chapters on medical beliefs and practices. Like other recent scholars, she attends to the connections between astrology and medicine in this period and the logic thereof. Due to the importance of the “non-naturals” for preventing ailments in early modern medical theory, she explains how these factors applied to advice about horses. These included issues like air (by extension, the general environment), diet, and exercise. The book also provides an overview of the diagnosis and treatment of ailments, including pharmaceutical remedies and surgery. It concludes with two chapters on the dissemination of equine medical information through oral, manuscript, and printed means.

Curth writes that her purpose is to “open up a new area of academic interest and study” in the “virtually unexplored area” of the history of early modern veterinary medicine (p. 6). Indeed, the book contains many fascinating details about past equine medical care, such as advice about stable construction, the commercialization of equine medications, and the connections between bloodletting and astrology. It accordingly prompts many questions for further research, facilitated by Curth’s clarity regarding her source base. For instance, the seventh chapter “Oral and Manuscript Culture” includes summaries of household manuscript collections containing horse remedies digitized by the Wellcome Library. She offers some comparisons between these household books and printed remedies; additional research using such manuscript evidence will hopefully provide more clues about the most common equine ailments, the cures used in practice, and their relationship to treatments in printed sources.

In addition, the book invites further investigation about the similarities and differences between human and equine ailments and treatments in this period, especially since Curth relates her work to the “One Medicine” movement (more recently coined “One Health”). This initiative seeks to promote collaboration between researchers across medical and ecological disciplines, in part to better understand the relationship between human and animal health and the environment. Historians like Curth have shown that past medical cultures (like that of early modern England) did not exhibit as sharp a divide between human and animal medicine as exists today, and operated with a more holistic concept of medicine.

Curth’s book is a helpful and engaging overview of early modern English equine care for specialists and non-specialists alike, and provides an important framework and foundation for further research.

¹ See especially Louise Hill Curth, The Care of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

² Curth, “The Care of the Brute Beast: Animals and the Seventeenth-Century Medical Market-place,” Social History of Medicine 15, no. 3 (December 2002): 375-392. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/15.3.375.

The Comanche Empire. By Pekka Hämäläinen. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Review by Christopher Valesey

    Winner of twelve book awards, Comanche Empire is a landmark of ethnohistorical scholarship. Pekka Hämäläinen challenges more typical narratives of European imperialism that feature the rapid dissolution of indigenous civilizations by drawing attention to the rise and fall of the so-called Comanche Empire in the modern American Southwest from roughly 1750 to 1850. Despite being surrounded by Spanish, French, and Anglo-American domains, Hämäläinen argues that “European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance, it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism” (2). This Comanche-style imperialism differed from Euro-Americans in that Comanches sought coexistence, control, and exploitation rather than conquest and colonization (4).

    Ethnohistorical research is often hamstrung by a dearth of sources written by the indigenous group under study. While this is true for Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen offers an impressive analysis of Spanish, French, Mexican, and Anglo-American sources like government reports, captivity narratives, travelers’ journals, and traders’ accounts. Although Euro-American sources accentuate the military and economic aspects of the Comanche Empire rather than the cultural, they allow Hämäläinen to pay close attention to the implications of various events like the Bourbon Reforms, the French and Indian Wars, and the Mexican-American War. Taken together, Hämäläinen structures the book primarily chronologically to examine the lifespan of the Comanche Empire, beginning with Comanches’ alliance with Utes in the early eighteenth century and concluding with the empire’s collapse soon after the American Civil War.

     Perhaps the most striking feature of the Comanche Empire was their adaptive use of horses, particularly the Spanish-introduced Barbs that descended from North Africa and thrived in the southern plains. Indeed, tying in previous publications in Western Historical Quarterly and the Journal of American History, Hämäläinen describes Comanches’ adoption of horses as an “equine revolution” (347). Equestrianism dramatically altered Comanche hunting, warfare, and transportation, exponentially expanding their world and the speed in which they could travel through it. With horses, Comanches transformed their entire economy to center around bison hunting and horse herding.  Horses’ voracious appetite for the abundant buffalo and grana grasses not only allowed the equine and Comanche populations to skyrocket, but in Hämäläinen’s words, allowed Comanches to “exploit the vast reserves of bioenergy stored in the plains’ bison herds more thoroughly than any of their competitors” (66). Comanches’ use of horses was so effective that nearby plains tribes had no choice but to become mounted if they wanted to avoid being marginalized by Comanches (356). Ironically, the success of Comanche equestrianism also contributed to the fall of the empire: the rapidly declining bison population in the mid-nineteenth century, exacerbated by Euro-American hunting, appears to have crippled Comanches’ military and economic hegemony more than any armed conflict with Euro-Americans.

     In addition to the military, demographic, and economic ramifications of horses, Comanches established a distinct culture of equestrianism with influences on wealth, social status, and gender. They selectively bred horses to optimize their endurance, speed, size, and even color. According to Hämäläinen, Comanches recognized at least seventeen different types of horses based solely on their color (246). The wealth of individual or families of Comanches could be determined by the number of horses they owned as private property. The average Comanche family owned twenty to thirty horses, but the most affluent elites could own hundreds (260). While teenage boys worked most closely with the horses on a daily basis, women participated in horse herding in addition to their responsibilities for childrearing, meat processing, the tanning of hides, and a range of household duties. Horses constituted a form of social currency that provided men with the means of gift-giving in exchange for wives, a massive advantage for the wealthy in a polygynist society. A lack of horses prevented young men from acquiring wives, and it also limited their access to other activities like trade. Without a horse, men were required to borrow them from peers, indebting them to a portion of the spoils of war or any wealth they would receive. Elites, on the other hand, could use their horses to make investments in more slaves and wives, in turn generating surplus commodities and food.

     As any effective work of scholarship should, Comanche Empire raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Although this reader is convinced by the author’s usage of “empire,” some of the sharpest criticisms of the book revolve around whether or not Comanches established one. These discussions may be the most exciting contribution of the book. One productive and related question is the extent to which Comanches’ created an empire not only like Euro-Americans, but like other well-known indigenous empires like the Mexica in Central Mexico and Inca in Peru. This is not a critique of the book, but just the opposite: Comanche Empire’s ability to challenge historiographical trends and generate debate secures its spot in graduate class syllabi and the bookshelves of all ethnohistorians.